Technology evolves quickly. When you first created your Rails application, it's likely you did it using the latest version of Rails. As time passes, however, new Rails versions come out and your application becomes more and more out of touch with the latest version. But why is this important?

Have you ever dealt with a unicode bug? Where plain text — the substance you work with all day — can no longer be trusted? It can be disorienting to say the least! This article will help prepare you so that the next time that happens you’ll be able to spend less time hyperventilating.

Not only did it physically hurt to hear, but it also made me realize that Test Driven Development is another one of those Agile Software Practices which may seem like an urban legend. To that avail, I would like to use this article to address it’s doubters directly.